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Academic Update- February 2017

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November’s deadlines were supposed to mark the unofficial end of my MSc. However, I’m going to be in academic-land for a little longer now, as I’ve been offered two really cool opportunities involving my MSc work. (So these should really just be called academic updates now…).

The first opportunity I’ve been given is presenting my findings at a conference on Open Educational Resources in April. That’s somewhere between awesome and terrifying right now, especially as I’m really not a fan of presentations, and that I wasn’t expecting to be accepted when I applied!

The other potential opportunity is from my dissertation supervisor, who has encouraged me to adapt my MSc dissertation into a journal article. We’re currently discussing how this might work, and what kind of places would be interested in the research I did. I’m not sure how to feel about the opportunity yet, as after the disappointing provisional grade my dissertation received, I assumed my work wasn’t good enough to be used anywhere else. Getting a journal article from a dissertation which only received a passing grade (provisionally) just seems illogical.

Technically, I already am an academic author thanks to the project I helped with as an undergraduate, as the results of that experiment were published. However, that feels different, mostly because of the difference in my role. In the other project, I was a research assistant along with the two other students, rather than the main author. So this is a big step up, and a situation I feel a little out of my depth in. Still, it’s an exciting new part of academia to explore.